by Chris Vola
Whatever the case was, Ryan didn’t like the way the man stared at him, like Ryan was some kind of living cadaver. The way Karl had been pawing and prodding at him, timid yet eager, as if he couldn’t wait to dig deeper and was only waiting for Vanessa’s command to do so. The way the rotten breath seeped from his crooked sneer.
“You have a lot of questions,” Vanessa said, making one of the most obvious statements of all time, Ryan thought. “And you’re nervous. Your heart rate is going through the roof. Don’t worry, it’s not making me hungry. I find A positive to be absolutely vile.”
Ryan had been turned before blood types became common knowledge. He’d never known what his had been. She was right about A positive—it tasted like fermented chalk.
He struggled to sit up. “Thanks for the confidence booster,” he said after a minor coughing spell.
There was so much he wanted to find out, but in his still-groggy, adrenaline-addled state, he was drawn to the most glaring elephant in the room, one that was staring directly back at him. He was too far gone to be concerned with tactfulness. “I do have a few questions,” he said. “Let’s start with your face. What the hell happened?”
Vanessa shrugged. “I kept running into people I’d known from before I was turned. People who knew my parents and knew that they were looking for me. I was sick of having to pretend not to recognize them or to shut them up for good, of having to eat people whose blood I didn’t even like. I had to become someone else entirely, not just on the inside.”
She stood up and walked over to a large wood-framed mirror hanging between two bookcases. She gently touched her trout lips, ran her fingers across her ruined plastic cheeks. She sighed. “It was the early eighties,” she continued. “Karl is a great surgeon, was back then, but we were breaking new ground. No one understood the biology, how certain chemicals would react with the skin and tissues of someone who’d been turned. There was a period of trial and error. More than a few errors. But I’m okay with it. The change was what I needed.”
Over the years, Ryan had occasionally fantasized about what it would be like to see Vanessa again, how she would look, what they would say to each other. But this wasn’t a gracefully aged version of the fresh-faced poet-in-training who’d left him standing on the Bedford Avenue subway platform. This was something else entirely, far creepier than he could have ever imagined.
He started to ask her what she planned on doing with him but was interrupted by a series of muffled thuds and what sounded like moaning coming from somewhere nearby. Ryan looked across the room, opposite from where Vanessa was standing, past a leather couch and glass coffee table, and noticed, for the first time, a large but unassuming door in an undecorated corner. It was painted the same shade of banana yellow as the apartment’s walls but was made of a different material, possibly metal. After another few seconds of louder pounding and sobbing noises, it became obvious that something was on the other side, trying to force its way into the apartment.
Vanessa turned and stared at the door. She sighed knowingly, as if she’d forgotten some basic part of her daily routine, like checking the mail or taking out the trash. “I have a newborn,” she said, “whom I turned last week. And who’s apparently hungry again.”
Ryan shot up into a sitting position, nearly tearing the needle from his arm, his fight-or-flight response kicking in hard. He knew too well what a newborn was capable of. Even if his blood type was inferior, its appetite wouldn’t allow it to discriminate.
Karl looked up from his laptop and glared disapprovingly, like Ryan was nothing more than an ignorant, misbehaving child.
“It’s all right,” Vanessa said, a grin creeping across her formerly serious face. “The chamber’s solid concrete, half a foot thick, and the walls are reinforced with another quarter inch of steel. It was built to hold even the most rambunctious toddler, among other things. Though I never planned on becoming a mother so soon. But that’s another story.”
She turned and walked over to the spiral staircase that led to a loft area that Ryan couldn’t quite see, his view blocked by a row of vaguely nautical hanging lights that formed the border between the kitchen and the living room. She paused at the bottom of the stairs. “We have a lot to talk about,” she said, “but right now I need to go out and wrangle up some dinner for me and my, uh, progeny. In the meantime, let Karl take care of you, do a few more tests, figure out if there’s anything more we can do for you. I’ll see you both when I get back.”
“Yes, master,” Karl mumbled in a faux-dramatic, and possibly faux-Transylvanian, accent.
As Vanessa walked up the stairs, Ryan tried to tell her that he’d be fine to leave on his own, tried to ask her where his backpack was, tried to tell Karl—who was dutifully slathering an ultrasound wand with what looked like Vaseline—to fuck off. But he couldn’t. He found that his body had been overtaken by a powerful fatigue that made it almost impossible to speak or to move. Ryan had a sinking feeling that whatever was being pumped into his bloodstream wasn’t just saline, but the apprehension was brief, quickly replaced by a synthetic euphoria. He noticed that his limbs were pain-free and the coughing had stopped. The weight of the last few days—James’s betrayal, the guilt about Jennifer, the guy from the Manhattan tribe who’d absorbed the head shot like it was nothing, the shock of seeing Vanessa—seemed to lift away from him, leaving him floating untethered on a zephyr, pushing him further and further away from himself, from the memories that now seemed like they were nothing more than scenes from a sad, half-forgotten movie about someone else.
Karl loomed over the cot, pressed the slime-covered wand against Ryan’s chest, and started moving it around, humming what sounded like the chorus to Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way.” The pounding noises behind the metal door grew louder and became more violent, interspersed with bloodcurdling shrieks.
Ryan smiled and closed his eyes.
He didn’t care about any of it.
24
Vanessa watched Ryan take a bite of the tuna melt he’d ordered with the slightest hint of envy flitting across her face.
“I hated you for so long,” she said, pretending to pick at the side salad on the plate in front of her.
They were sitting at a table at the Grey Dog, a small eatery and coffeehouse on the corner of Bedford Street and Carmine Street in the West Village, a short walk from Vanessa’s apartment on Sullivan Street. A walk they’d taken casually, as if Vanessa were totally unconcerned about the incident on East 80th Street, a sequence of events that was still mostly unclear to Ryan.
He was wearing a red St. John’s hoodie and a pair of brown slacks that he’d found neatly folded on Vanessa’s dining table when he’d woken up a couple of hours before, needle-less, on the cot. The contents of his backpack—the extra magazines for his gun, his phone, the Ziploc bag, the flash drive—had been spread out next to the clothes, along with Arthur’s freshly cleaned knife and a sonogram printout of a pair of lungs.
The tumors were obvious, even to an untrained eye. Circular black splotches so numerous that the images looked like they could have been black-and-white close-ups of a leopard’s hide. Looking at them, Ryan had felt almost nothing. They were simply confirmation of what he’d already felt happening inside himself before he’d been turned; calling it cancer didn’t change the fact that he was dying.
“I got off the subway at Union Square,” Vanessa continued, putting down her fork and absentmindedly tugging at the strands of her hair that were draped over her shoulders and the front of her black tank top. “I walked around for a while but I didn’t know where to go. I thought about going back to you in Brooklyn, thought about taking the bus to Trenton and hitching it to my parents’ place, thought about a dozen other options, but none of them felt right. I was sitting on a bench somewhere near Grand Central a few hours later, having a coffee when this guy came up to me. He was young, dressed in all black, ear pierced, a weirdly attractive cross between Paul Newman and Sid Vicious.”
�
�You always were good at attracting the dangerous ones,” Ryan said, not entirely sure if he was trying to be funny.
Vanessa chuckled dryly. “This guy—he said his name was Philip—approached me, fed me some lines about how I was like nothing he’d ever seen before, begged me to let him buy me dinner. I was in no position to refuse a free meal. Come to find out, he was a blood-eater, and he happened to be in the process of finding someone to turn.”
“Blood-eater?” Ryan scoffed. “Is that what you call yourselves?”
“Among other things,” she replied. “Why, what’s wrong with that?”
“It’s … I don’t know, don’t you think it’s a little cheesy?”
Vanessa shrugged, mildly annoyed. “At least it’s accurate, better than misappropriating and mangling a sacred but unpronounceable Native American word. Anyways, back to Philip. I later found out that the reason he had been drawn to me was that he smelled you on the clothes I was wearing, on my skin, knew that I’d recently been with one of his own kind. It made him curious. He had a million other options, but he chose me. And so here I am today. Mostly because of you.”
“I’m really sorry?” Ryan mumbled after a few seconds, not knowing what else to say.
Vanessa reached across the table and placed her hand on Ryan’s. “I’m over it,” she said reassuringly. “I have been for years and years. It makes total sense why you didn’t tell me who you were. I was just some idiot girl who you felt bad for and let shack up with you for a couple weeks. And even if you had told me, I definitely wouldn’t have believed you.”
“You aren’t—weren’t—just an idiot girl.”
She snorted, rolled her eyes. “That’s probably what you say to all of your conquests,” she said sardonically. “You’re right, though, I’m not, not anymore. It took six months of living with Philip, or Martin, or Oswald, whatever the hell his original Dutch name was, to beat the stupid out of me. Literally. He didn’t want to raise a scared and confused child. He’d only procreated because the Committee had voted on it, had forced it on him for being a generally deviant fuck-up for three-hundred-plus years. Maybe they thought parenthood would change him. But the only thing he wanted from me—the only thing he ever wanted—was another submissive plaything that he could control. But I was stronger than the Vietnamese and Ukrainian girls he’d buy and ruin in a couple days. He fed me on their scraps, kept me locked in a titanium-reinforced cage on the top floor of his brownstone, naked, only brought me out when he wanted to try something that would have knocked out or killed a human too quickly. A baseball bat insertion, a high-voltage livestock prod. One week that stands out was when he got his hands on a few medieval devices after they’d been exhibited at the Met or somewhere. His favorite was something called an Iron Spider. Do you know what it feels like to have to regrow an entirely new set of breast tissue that’s been torn off from the inside?”
Ryan winced in secondhand pain. “I was shot twice, but…” he said, trailing off. He put down his fork. His appetite was completely gone.
“But I healed fast,” Vanessa continued, her voice resolute, unshaking. “Always have. Or at least faster than he expected. One night he’d left me on the floor for a few minutes while he sat in a chair, facing away, studying the flesh he’d pulled from my back, rubbing it between his fingers, rubbing it against his face. I grabbed the wire that he’d left near me in his haste to touch the skin he’d taken, the one he always used on me when I refused to play. It was three feet long, made of a flexible metal, the middle two feet coated in the same chemical you saw me spray on Derrick Rhodes. Real nasty shit. I crawled behind my maker, wrapped the wire around his neck while he was still drunk on torture, before he knew what was going on. It was over fast. No matter how old you are or how fast you can heal, no one’s coming back without a head. I thought I was done, that when the Committee had been informed of what happened, I’d be the next to die. But when they found me and brought me in, it was like I was some kind of minor hero. Apparently my maker’s, uh, appetites were drawing the wrong kind of attention and it wasn’t like he was from one of the big families. If I hadn’t taken him out, someone else would have. They respected what I’d done, trained me to do more of the same.”
“The Committee?” Ryan whispered, lowering his voice as a group of stylishly scruffy twentysomethings walked by, laughing and speaking loudly in what sounded like French. “Should we even be talking about any of this here?”
“Relax,” Vanessa said, suddenly irritated. “I’d smell it if something wasn’t right. You’re safe with me. That should be obvious.”
Ryan immediately regretted questioning her judgment. If there was anyone to fear in the restaurant, it was the bona fide killer sitting across from him. “Sorry,” he said. “This is just a lot to take in.”
“Is it?” she asked. “It couldn’t have been that different for you in Brooklyn? You had to have some kind of hierarchy, a governing body, tribal elders.”
“Until a week ago, and for the last sixty years, there were only six of us left. One is older than the rest, but I’ve never considered him an authority. There were times when I’d go a year or more without seeing any of the others.”
Vanessa’s eyes widened in surprise. “Six?” she repeated in disbelief. “So, uh, you just kind of did whatever you wanted, no accountability?”
“Pretty much. As long as we kept a collectively low profile, there were no problems with keeping to ourselves. And all of us did, for the most part.”
“Wow,” she said, staring at Ryan as if he were from another planet. “It’s different here. With all the newborns, there are probably more than a hundred of us now. We’re governed by the Committee, sort of like a senate without elections. It includes some of the oldest members of the tribe, definitely the most powerful. For the most part they’ve got last names you see every day on street signs, museums, schools, hospitals, and monuments. The presumed-dead ancestors of the people who built New York. And are still building it today. They provide the rest of us with food, housing in buildings their families’ companies own, money, anonymity, security, whatever we need. In return, we always have to be ready in case they want us to do something for them, depending on your individual personality and skill set. Usually it’s small stuff, grunt work. Drive one of the higher-ups somewhere, transport a package or documents, oversee production at one of the food-processing facilities. Because of my accelerated healing and speed, quote-unquote antisocial tendencies, and what they considered a penchant for assassination, they decided to train me—firearms, jujitsu, Muay Thai, all that shit. My job is straightforward. They give me a target. I eliminate that target, regardless of species, no questions asked. Derrick Rhodes was just the latest, one of several hundred. It’s what I’ve done, what I’ve always done, until they sent out the memo last month saying that everyone who wasn’t a maker yet had to turn someone immediately. Not something that I would normally ever consider, at least for a couple hundred years. I mean, I already have Karl. When I first met him, fresh into his residency at NewYork-Presbyterian, he was like a little lost puppy. Had a decent bone to play with, too, which is why I kept him around. Now he’s a sad old mutt who needs me more than ever. But like I said, when the Committee contacts you, you don’t ask questions.”
“I guess living forever always has a price,” Ryan said, though he found it nearly impossible to identify with anything that Vanessa had lived through, anything she’d had to do to survive, the totalitarian bureaucracy she was apparently forced to serve.
Vanessa reached into her alligator-skin Givenchy purse, took some cash out, and put it on the table. She made no move to get up. “There is a price,” she agreed. “One that you decided wasn’t worth paying anymore, even though it seems like you had it pretty good in Brooklyn. Which is why I want to know why you gave it up, why you were working with Derrick Rhodes to expose us. That is what you were doing, isn’t it? Don’t tell me that you’d just been walking around and decided to randomly sit down and chat with tha
t freak. Also, what’s up with the knife? I’ve never felt anything like it.”
“The knife was my maker’s,” Ryan said. “You’d have to ask him about it. The only problem is that he left Brooklyn a long time ago, decades before you were born and a week after I was turned. He wasn’t the best at explaining, well, anything. And now he’s gone for good.”
Vanessa snickered. “At least we have one thing in common,” she said. “Deadbeat dads.”
Ryan nodded. “As for the papers,” he said, “I didn’t ask for them. I didn’t know who Derrick Rhodes was until a couple days ago. I was meeting with him because we had a mutual friend who said that Derrick might be able to help me track someone by hacking into my phone.”
He paused. Vanessa stared at him, unblinking, her lips pursed and skeptical.
“That doesn’t explain anything, does it?” he asked, rhetorically.
She shook her head slowly. She pushed her salad away and folded her palms together on the table, waiting.
Ryan took a deep breath and weighed his options. He could continue being evasive or say nothing at all, but that would only continue to piss Vanessa off, something that didn’t seem advisable under even the best circumstances.
But in the last two weeks he’d been manipulated by most of the people he’d ever trusted. What made her any different? She might be working with James and know everything about him, about Arthur, about the jaguar statue. Maybe she’d been handpicked to make contact with him because of their previous relationship. Cutting him loose and carrying him from the basement was just an elaborate ruse to get him to confide in her. Maybe there was no Committee. Maybe she was the Committee.
